Scout, Atticus, & Boo

by Mary McDonagh Murphy

  Mary Badham as Scout in the film of To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Courtesy of Mary Badham Wilt.

  The movie amplified the novel’s importance, and the two—a masterpiece in each medium—are anomalies together.

  To Kill a Mockingbird received eight Academy Award nominations and forty-eight years later has the same staying power as the novel. In the last twenty years, the film has appeared on various American Film Institute lists: It was number two on the Best American Films of All Time list of 2006 (It’s a Wonderful Life was number one), and Atticus Finch was the number one Greatest Movie Hero of the 20th Century in 2003.

  “You don’t get a chance to have a film and a book that makes that kind of impact,” said Badham, who made two more movies and retired from acting at fourteen. “This is not a black-and-white 1930s issue. Racism and bigotry haven’t gone anywhere, ignorance hasn’t gone anywhere.”

  “A REMINDER TO THE PEOPLE AT HOME”

  By March 1963, when Harper Lee turned up in Chicago to give a press conference about the film, the civil rights movement had entered the national consciousness. Times had clearly changed, as evidenced by the questions the young novelist was asked. Rogue, a men’s magazine along the lines of Playboy and Esquire, covered the press conference. “What follows is an account of the flood of questions the noted writer must endure, all in the name of publicity,” read the story, which added character descriptions and stage directions to go with dialogue.

  “Harper Lee arrived. She is 36-years-old, tall, and a few pounds on the wrong side of Metrecal [a popular diet drink]. She has dark, short-cut, uncurled hair; bright, twinkling eyes; a gracious manner; and Mint Julep diction.”

  REPORTER: Have you seen the movie?

  MISS LEE: Yes. Six times. (It was soon learned that she feels the film did justice to the book, and though she did not have script approval, she enjoyed the celluloid treatment with “unbridled pleasure.”)

  REPORTER: What’s going to happen when it’s shown in the South?

  MISS LEE: I don’t know. But I wondered the same thing when the book was published. But the publisher said not to worry, because no one can read down there.

  PR MAN: It opened in Florida—

  MISS LEE: Phil, honey—that’s not the South.

  REPORTER: When you wrote the book, did you hold yourself back?

  MISS LEE (patiently): Well, sir, in the book I tried to give a sense of proportion to life in the South, that there isn’t a lynching before every breakfast. I think that Southerners react with the same kind of horror as other people do about the injustice in their land. In Mississippi, people were so revolted by what happened, they were so stunned, I don’t think it will happen again.

  REPORTER: What do you think of the Freedom Riders [the civil rights activists who rode buses into the segregated South to challenge the law]?

  MISS LEE: I don’t think much of this business of getting on buses and flaunting [sic] state laws does much of anything. Except getting a lot of publicity and violence. I think Reverend King and the NAACP are going about it exactly the right way. The people in the South may not like it but they respect it.

  REPORTER (cub variety):I came in late so maybe you’ve already been asked this question, but I’d like to know if your book is an indictment against a group in society.

  MISS LEE (nonplussed): The book is not an indictment so much as a plea for something, a reminder to people at home.

  The people at home may not have been Lee’s best audience, initially. As Rick Bragg said, “I think it was one of those books where the people down the road might shoot you a dirty look or say mean things about you as the car rolls by, but people a thousand miles away love you and admire you and think that you’ve done something decent and grand.”

  Monroeville was segregated; its public schools did not integrate until 1970—ten years after the novel was published. Mary Tucker, a teacher, said she was one of the few black residents who read the novel in 1960. White people in town, she recalled, “resented Atticus’s defending a black man.”

  Another response was a bit of a shrug: The setting was so familiar. It was not until Gregory Peck came calling, said Jane Ellen Clark, director of the Monroe County Heritage Museum, that the town sat up and took notice. “Everybody has a story of Gregory Peck being here in this town, staying at the hotel, eating in the restaurants, and visiting Mister Lee. That’s when people noticed the book. If Hollywood’s gonna make a movie out of this book, then there’s something about it that’s special.”

  “THE LAY OF THE LAND THAT FORMED YOU”

  Today in Monroeville a piece of the stone wall that once separated the houses of the Lees and Capote’s relatives is all that’s left of the old neighborhood. In the fifties, the Lee family house on South Alabama Avenue was torn down and replaced by Mel’s Dairy Dream, a white shack where hot dogs and ice cream are served through a window. The spot where Capote’s family once lived is now an empty lot, save for two of his aunt’s camellia bushes and the remnants of a stone fishpond. There’s a plaque. The streets are wider and paved, and businesses have sprawled out far beyond the town square.

  Every year at the museum, the local Mockingbird Players perform a stage version of the story to raise funds for the building’s maintenance. The second act takes place inside the old courtroom, and twelve ticket holders are seated as the jury. There’s a gift shop with books, postcards, coffee mugs, and souvenirs such as necklaces with miniaturized movie stills of Badham, the actress who played Scout. Mockingbird pilgrims come and go and stop for coffee at the Bee Hive or Radley’s Grille, the best restaurant and the only place to get a drink in an otherwise dry county.

  Making those trips to Monroeville and trying to graft Harper Lee’s life onto the novel is something readers love to do, but novelists such as Childress, who has set half of his books in Alabama, have less interest in the exercise. “Her life was probably something like the life in there,” he said, “but it wasn’t so beautifully dramatically shaped, and there wasn’t one moment that pulled it all together. That’s the beauty of fiction, that’s what fiction can do: give shape to narrative.”

  Wally Lamb “came to a realization over the years that I bet is true of Harper Lee, as well. You start with who and what you know. You take a survey of the lay of that land that formed you and shaped you, and then you begin to lie about it. You tell one lie that turns into a different lie, and after a while those models sort of lift off and become their own people rather than the people you originally thought of. And when you weave an entire network of lies, what you’re really doing, if you’re aiming to write literary fiction, is, by telling lies, you’re trying to arrive at a deeper truth.”

  James McBride said the deeper truth is all that matters. “To Kill a Mockingbird is rooted in reality, and it worked,” he said. “When the writer gets to the mainland, nobody asks how they got there…. Who cares if you got there on the Titanic, or you paddled with a boat, or you jumped from lily pad to lily pad? You got to the mainland, and that’s what counts.”

  “I DIDN’T EXPECT THE BOOK TO SELL IN THE FIRST PLACE”

  “What was your reaction to the novel’s enormous success?” radio interviewer Roy Newquist asked Harper Lee in March 1964.

  “Well, I can’t say it was one of surprise. It was one of sheer numbness. It was like being hit over the head and knocked out cold. You see, I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I didn’t expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick merciful death I’d expected.”

  And that was last time Harper Lee sat for a full interview. “She did not think that a writer needed to be recognized in person and it bothered her when she got too familiar,” Miss Alice explained. “As tim
e went on she said that reporters began to take too many liberties with what she said. So, she just wanted out. And she started that and did not break her rule. She felt like she’d given enough.”

  But in 1966, the Delta Review, a New Orleans magazine, published “An Afternoon with Harper Lee,” by Don Lee Keith, a curious first-person account of meeting the novelist in Monroeville. Long on description, short on quotes, it said that Lee had stopped granting personal interviews. Lee’s quotations bear a striking resemblance to those in McCalls and Life, published in 1961. A former feature writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Don Lee Keith taught journalism at the University of New Orleans until he died in 2003. His papers reside there. And while the collection has boxes filled with research, interviews, and notes on Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, among others, there’s no documentation of what went into his article about Harper Lee.

  In a remembrance, former student Perry Kasprazk wrote that Keith talked about how he got that story. “Keith was fond of saying that a telephone book was a reporter’s best friend. He qualified this maxim with the story of how he got one of the only eight interviews with Nelle Harper Lee. Keith called the residence of her sister, whose number he found in the telephone directory, and Harper Lee herself answered. Keith said, ‘Hi, my name is Don Lee Keith, and you don’t know me, but you ought to.’ Charmed, she invited him over for tea and an interview.”

  We don’t know whether Harper Lee considered that an interview or not, or what she thought about anything, really, after that. We do know her novel kept growing in stature and popularity—and shows no signs of slowing down.

  “To Kill a Mockingbird tells a tale that we know is still true,” Scott Turow said. “We may live, eventually, in a world where that kind of race prejudice is unimaginable. And people may read this story in three hundred years and say, ‘So what was the big deal?’ But the fact of the matter is, in today’s America, it still speaks a fundamental truth.”

  “One of the unacknowledged powers of the novel,” Gurganus said, “is that, here in this little town, in these two hundred pages, a life is saved, something is salvaged, perfect justice is achieved, however improbably. And I think that that’s one of the reasons we read, is to have our faith in the process renewed.”

  After To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee published four essays but not another novel, a fact that prompts speculation, lots of it. Other writers are especially good at that.

  Scott Turow said, “It’s a frightening thing to another novelist to write a book that good and then shut up.”

  Richard Russo said, “Whenever a writer is gifted enough and fortunate enough to write a book as good as that, you can’t help but think, What else?”

  David Kipen said, “I wish I could be one of these people who say, ‘It’s churlish to want more from a woman who’s already given us so much,’ but I’m a greedy reader, and I think a true reader has to be a greedy reader. I wanted the next book, and I will always feel cheated for not having gotten it.”

  Lee Smith said, “It’s just astonishing to me that Harper Lee just stopped. I bet she hasn’t. I bet she’s sneaking around doing it. I bet she’s sitting in her house like Boo Radley, writing. I hope so.”

  Oprah Winfrey said Harper Lee brought up Boo Radley when they had lunch. “She said to me, ‘You know the character Boo Radley?’ And then she said, ‘Well, if you know Boo, then you understand why I wouldn’t be doing an interview, because I am really Boo.’”

  Boo she may be, and dragging her “shy ways into the limelight” would be a sin, to quote Sheriff Tate from the novel. And so, there is no second book.

  “She didn’t put herself under the burden of writing like she did when she was doing Mockingbird. But she continued to write something. I think she was just working on maybe short things with an idea of incorporating them into something. She didn’t talk too much about it.” That’s what Miss Alice said, and then quoted her sister. “She says you couldn’t top what she had done. She told one of our cousins who asked her, ‘I haven’t anywhere to go, but down.’”

  “Maybe for Harper Lee there was nothing else to play,” James McBride said. “She sang the song, she played the solo, and she walked off the stage. And we’re all the better for it. We’re very grateful to her for the amount of love that she’s given us.”

  “A love story, pure and simple” is how Harper Lee once described her first and only book. To Kill a Mockingbird is her love, her story, her labor. She holds its birthright. And we, readers all, gave it life.

  Long may it live.

  PART II

  The Interviews

  Mary Badham

  Mary Badham was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1952. At the age of nine, she played Scout in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. (Patty Duke won that year for The Miracle Worker.)

  After appearing in two more movies, Badham retired from acting at fourteen. More than forty years later, Badham was coaxed out of retirement—briefly—and appeared as Mrs. Nutbush in the film Our Very Own (2005). She is currently an art restorer in Virginia and frequently gives talks about her role in the film.

  There had been a general cattle call throughout the South, with theaters and actors in the area, as well as the general population, to let them know there was going to be an audition for To Kill a Mockingbird. My mom had to go to ask my dad, who said no. But my mom had him so wrapped. She said, “Now, Henry, what are the chances that the child will get the part anyway?”

  When we went in for the audition, they gave us a copy of the script, and I read it and I loved it. My mom said that the next morning at the breakfast table I was popping out with lines already—Scout’s lines. She knew that I had something. Evidently, I did.

  I went to New York for a screen test, passed that, and went on to California to film it.

  Frankly, I didn’t read the book until after I had my daughter. That’s embarrassing. But in defense of me, how many times have you seen a film and read the book and it totally alters your whole impression of the work? I had my whole life up there on the screen, and I was perfectly happy with the way it was.

  When I did read the book, here were all these people that I never knew existed! People that we all have in our families, good or otherwise.

  Learning more about the relationship of Boo was interesting.

  I would love to have included the parts of the book that talked of our relationship with Calpurnia, for it was so close to my relationship with the ladies who raised me, Beddie Harris and Frankie McCall. Frankie McCall was our majordomo and raised six generations of Badhams. When the book covered going to church with Cal, we did that as children with Beddie and Frankie. We went to their houses, it was part of our upbringing. Frankie knew more about what it was to be a lady than most white people. She expected and demanded the best from us.

  Anyone who’s lived in the South during that time period of the thirties through the sixties and even today, can totally relate to the feel of the book and the tempo, as far as the slowness and the way things are done. The outgoingness. People go to church, and if you don’t go to church, they come to your house to check on you or call. If you are sick, they bring food. They take care of your garden if you are not able to.

  I think Scout and I were so similar. I grew up in a house full of boys, so I really didn’t relate to females at all. I didn’t understand females. I didn’t know anything about females other than my mother. That’s different when it’s your mother. I trailed around my brothers and nephews, and I wanted to be doing whatever they were doing. Of course, they didn’t want me doing whatever they were doing, and they would try and get rid of me. I felt so attached to Scout. I just wish I could have been as smart as Scout was, always there with the comeback. Scout was a lot smarter then I was. She’s a lot smarter then a lot of adults I know.

  Being on the set was playtime. We had a blast. Phillip [Alford, who played Jem] said that we used to fight all the time. I d
on’t remember it, but he said we did. Bob Mulligan was one of the best directors ever. He would squat down and get eye to eye and talk to me like an adult. I don’t ever remember him talking to us like children. He would just set up the scene for us. “The camera’s gonna be here, you’re gonna be here. We’re gonna move this way. And then you do your line.” How I delivered the lines was left to me. I could do them on the fly. I think it shows when you look at the footage now, it was brilliant.

  I think we only got as much of the script as we needed to know. I knew nothing about film. I knew nothing about the business. I was just a normal, stupid kid from Birmingham, Alabama. But evidently I had memorized all the lines. So somebody would hesitate on a line, and be thinking about how to deliver the line, and I would think that they were having trouble with their lines, so I would mouth it. And they’d say, “Cut. You can’t do that, Mary. We can see you on film doing that. You can’t mouth the lines.” It was bad. Phillip got so mad at me for that. I’m sure everybody did. I just didn’t know about film.

  [For the scene in the porch swing with Gregory Peck when Atticus says, “Scout, do you know what a compromise is?”] I was supposed to cry, and I couldn’t cry. I was having fun. I was happy. They tried everything. They took me off to the side and they said, “Did you ever lose a pet?” All this stuff. They finally resorted to blowing onion juice in my eye to try and help.